I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Peasant carts deliver Somorja’s Jewish community to a small synagogue yard crowded with five hundred families from regional communities. Their furniture and belongings are piled in the yard. The five Friedmanns share two small rooms with another family. Beds and cots are set up in every available space, including bathrooms and the synagogue itself. Bitton-Jackson says this was convenient for never missing morning prayers. At first, she is self-conscious about being watched by the Hungarian soldiers and military police who guard them, but that eventually, they become part of the scenery.

The yard becomes the center of life, where families cook and use public baths and toilets. Initial confusion transforms “into a harmonious hustle and bustle” (40). People begin to feel optimistic; they are surviving attempts to degrade and humiliate them. Bitton-Jackson learns “to like the ghetto” and values the intimacy of their shared fate— “embraces, scoldings, tears, laughter, cries of pain and joy” (41). She feels like “a limb of a larger body” (41). For the first time in her life, she feels “happy to be a Jew” and is happy to share “this peculiar condition of Jewishness” (41). Sequestered in their “yard of oppression,” they understand each other as no one on the other side of the fence can (41).